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The Warlock IX by Mackinley Clevinger, August 14, 2016
I felt my feet placed against a cold, stone floor, a voice speaking the same words again as the door was shut behind me. Left in the darkness, I collapsed in a shivering, sobbing heap, the freezing ground draining heat from my tiny form. I was surrounded by a swirling storm of darkness, the frenzy of fear and hopelessness silencing any parts of my mind that knew this was fake, nothing more than a nightmare I was trapped within.
A thought remained consistent, one little nugget of information permitted through the veil of terror, an oddity I only understood in flashes before sinking back into the mind-numbing twisted memories I faced.
As the door creaked open, I latched onto the thought, a moment’s confusion shifting into hopelessness as the number seventy-three erupted in my mind before resettling, the sound of quiet footsteps padding towards me taking prominence, yet sounding… different, somehow. Different to what? I wasn’t supposed to be able to… remember…
I halted mid-sob, the scene I had been trapped in changing before my eyes as a foot prodded my back, no hands reaching down to cradle me and whisper softly into my ears, teasing out the secrets that wanted to stay buried.
“Enough. It was amusing at first, but it drags on for far too long. Much like your life, it seems.”
I pushed myself from the ground, legs curled up beside me as I noticed the maelstrom surrounding me had receded to a low ring again, the room I’d been in replaced with a grassy field set before tall stone walls, flags of all colors waving in the wind. The walls were pristine, white and radiant in the light of a clear sky that shone softly upon the brilliantly green rolling hills around me.
“I remember your death well, Warlock. A gristly thing, but necessary. Or at least, that’s what they thought at the time, and few would dare challenge the heroes of Haven.”
The voice changed between sentences, one moment a man’s before becoming a woman’s, seeming to cycle through four different voices that were oddly familiar. A clear, deep man’s voice that boomed in my ears, something heard over the sounds of a bloody battlefield. A whispery woman’s voice, tongue suited more for arcane syllables than conversation. Another woman, the passive cheerfulness she expressed at odds with what she said, and a man with a low, quiet voice that rasped as his words crept up on me.
“Not that anyone wanted to, after what you did. I suppose I should be thankful to you, in some respects, but truly all your return seems to be is a… complication, more than anything else. Not really the joyous reunion I once imagined, but I’m sure you can understand what a few centuries will do to someone.”
The voices moved around me, coming from no one that I could see and constantly changing place. They were familiar, each presenting part of an image in my mind that I couldn’t quite place. Not voices I’d known for a long time, but ones that had been present at an important time, a moment immortalized in memory.
“They seem to have left you quite the worse for wear, I must say. If you could see yourself right now, well, let me tell you…”
A gauntleted hand appeared out of nowhere and grabbed me by the rumpled front of my robe, dragging me to my feet unceremoniously to meet a scarred face twisted into an ugly grimace, an unnatural expression on that strangely white skin as he glared at me and hissed.
“You would be begging me to open those gates and let you in.”
He threw me away from himself, the vicious voice and sudden act of force stunning me as I fell. The knight disappeared in a flash, a feminine chuckle rising behind me as soft boots padded across the grass to stand beside me, a cheery, rosy, again white, face ornamented by a chain ending in a twisting symbol looking down at me as loose robes fluttered in the light breeze.
“It’s funny; to me, at least. Salvation lies just beyond those walls; beyond those great big, locked, doors; at a lovely chapel dedicated to that poor women you killed, oh so long ago. What do you think they’d do if they knew? I mean…”
In another flash the woman was gone, her taunting voice drifting through the empty air as I hoisted myself to my feet and searched around myself frantically. The rustling of cloth behind me was all the warning I got before an arm wrapped itself around my throat from behind, holding me still while a dark hand slid along my side, feeling me through the robe as the raspy voice took over.
“They’d hardly recognize you now, would they? You seem much more at ease than you used to; quite the trick you’ve pulled off, but would it be enough? A new face, a few centuries, and all is forgiven? Do you really think it’s going to be that easy to just waltz back in on a pretty pair of legs?”
The hand slipped lower, tugging at the hem of the robe and pressing its cold flesh against my bare leg, sliding upwards as revulsion shivered down my spine. I leaned into his form and threw my head back, falling through empty air as biting laughter slowly faded away. I fixed my robe as I got my feet underneath myself again, eyes darting around the field and body tensed.
“All I ever did was watch, like you asked me to, and this one… Honestly, I think she was more upset that you died than that friend of hers, Sohl. You were unlike anything she’d ever seen, wielding power that was completely alien to her. It’s too bad all the silly business with that roguish character got in her way; I think she could’ve figured out how to talk to me before the end.”
A woman stepped out of thin air, ornate red robes decorating her black skin as she stalked towards me, one hand propping up her chin while the other held her elbow, an elegant posture accompanying her steps. The air around her fizzled, jets of flame and bursts of force appearing as quickly as they disappeared in flashes of purple sparks.
“She never figured out how you did it all, where that power could possibly have come from. Truth be told, I don’t know any more than she did; a complete mystery to us both how a nothing like yourself managed to terrorize and destroy this region for so many years. It’s a shame; I can basically live forever, amass as much power as I like, and yet I’ll never be able to go back that relatively short amount of time to see how and why I even exist.”
With a twirl that sent her delicate robes flying out from her body, the woman disappeared, leaving me alone in the grassy fields again. Something caught my eye from the direction of the walls, the vague form of a horse carrying something on its back while a figure with incredibly bright hair pounded on a small wooden gate with a fist, their indecipherable voice barely reaching me.
After a pause I started to walk towards the woman, eyes glancing around myself for signs of one of the four… one of the four ‘heroes’ that had killed me suddenly appearing out of the air. I recognized the voices now, the occasional loud outburst more in line with what I remembered from their assault, but each one clearly belonging to that small group from so long ago.
There’d been the Knight, who had led them and… done the final deed, and the Sorceress who must have bound me within that tomb. I looked down at the holes in my robe, remembering the arrows that bit into me and rendered me useless. The Rogue, and then… That woman who’d died in the middle of trying to perform some ritual. The Cleric.
The Sorceress and the Rogue had looked normal, but there’d been something weird about the Knight and the Cleric that I remembered. Their skin had shone, practically glowing in the scant light provided by the moon that night. It was… weird, but not as strange as what lay before me now.
On the back of the horse I could see myself, but unconscious, bloody, torn up, and dressed in what scraps remained of the clothes I’d found. I raced forward and tried to grab ahold of the other me, maybe staunch some of the bleeding while I figured out what was going on, but as I reached out to touch the blood-matted hair and look at my face my hands passed through it and fell on empty air.
A voice tutted behind me. I turned from the nervous horse’s baggage and saw the brightly skinned woman shaking her head as she approached. The pounding on the gate eased up, the noisy blows replaced by periodic crunches of wood splintering beneath a great force, grunts of effort accompanying them.
“You’re a greater fool than I remember, but I suppose we all see the past differently. There’s nothing you can do from here, Warlock. It’s a dream, and I’ve wrested control from your nightmares to speak to you. Or, at you, rather. Do you have nothing to say?”
I looked back at my arms half-buried in the unconscious form, drawing them out slowly and stepping away from the figment before me. Rough bandaging was soaked with blood, the body’s breathing shallow and desperate. I turned, looking the woman approaching me and shrugging.
“What do you want from me?”
A stunned look came over the woman’s face, halting mid-step briefly before she bit her lip and tilted her head, looking at me with immense interest.
“Now that is a question I hadn’t considered.”